“What happened?” she asked, grateful that he spoke at least a little English. “Where does it hurt?”
“My side,” he said. “I got kicked.…”
At least it wasn’t a knife or a baseball bat. Her eyes wandered up to his mouth, but there were no blood bubbles, and the blood that was there all seemed to have come from his eyebrow. A kick could easily break a rib, and a broken rib could perforate a lung. The eyebrow would have to wait; it wasn’t life threatening. Chest pain could be.
“Take your jacket off. No, wait. I’ll help you.” She didn’t want him to move his torso too much until she had an idea of what was going on with his ribs. The need to call on her professional skills once again pushed her own nausea into the background, and she was grateful for that. She turned on the overhead light to see what she was doing and pulled the now blood-splattered white shirt to the side to expose his torso. There was a round red mark along the third rib on his left side, and he inhaled sharply when she touched it. But the bone felt intact; at most it was cracked, which was still enormously uncomfortable and would make breathing an unpleasant chore for a few days, but nothing worse.
“Are you a doctor?” he asked.
“Nurse.”
A flash of eagerness and hope lit up the eye that wasn’t stuck shut with blood.
“My brother,” he said. “Have you seen him? He’s sick.…”
“How old is he?” she asked.
“Sixteen.”
“No. Then I haven’t seen him.” Was he the sick, young Roma man who had disappeared from the garage? Should she ask? But she didn’t know anything other than that he was gone and that he might not be just sick but critically ill.
The man’s shoulders sank. She cautiously moved the hand protecting his eye so she could see the gash. It was what she had been expecting, a classic boxing injury. It bled a lot, but the gash wasn’t all that long, and Nina could have fixed it up with a drop of skin glue from her first aid kit if she had had a chance to grab it when she left Valby. Now she would have to make do with the car’s first aid kit, which wasn’t ideal, but better than nothing.
“Do you know the people out there?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
He sat perfectly still while she worked, almost as if he wasn’t completely present. As if he had disappeared into himself, to some place where the pain couldn’t reach him. It gave her a jolt of discomfort because that was a reaction she was more used to seeing in exhausted or abused refugee children, but at least it made him an easy patient. She cleaned the wound with a splash of iodine and closed the gaping gash with small pieces of surgical tape. Finally she turned the rearview mirror so he could view the results. The look in his eyes became more alert, and he thanked her again, just as politely as the first time.
“You’re welcome.”
Nina forced herself to smile as she felt the nausea come roiling back up from somewhere low in her abdomen. It was that refugee child’s reaction in him that made her continue:
“Are you in trouble? Is there anything I.…”
She only made it halfway through the question. It felt as if the car were sailing across the black asphalt, like a ship in rough waters. She opened the door, but only made it halfway out before she threw up, hanging out of her seat. Warm vomit spattered her sandal, her foot, and her bare leg. When the heaving stopped, she sat there for several seconds with her eyes closed and her forehead resting against the steering wheel, gasping the cool evening air.
Then she felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up. He had gotten out of the car and come around to her side to help her out. He looked scared, she thought. Worried and scared, in a way that looked wrong for someone that young. People his age usually lived secure in their faith in their own immortality.
He supported her gently under the elbow as she awkwardly straddled the little pool of vomit next to the car. There were small bright red splotches in the grayish yellow. Blood. That put paid to any lingering doubts. She was suffering from the same thing as the children at the garage.
Nina instinctively pulled her arm back and took a step away from the young man. If this was contagious, and she was a carrier, then she had already spent too long with him in the car, not to mention with Anton and all the kids on the field trip. She wasn’t too worried about herself or Anton. A well-equipped hospital would have no trouble curing this thing, whatever it was. It was a different matter for the Roma at the garage and for her injured passenger. She had no idea where he was going and if he would have access to a hospital if he got sick.
“This is just first aid,” she told him. “Get back in. I’ll drive you to the emergency room just as soon … just give me a moment.”
“No.” He shook his head vehemently.
She stared at him and felt an intense exasperation spread like heat through her chest. What was it with these people? Why couldn’t they just do what she said?
“You need more treatment. And the children out there. They need to go to the hospital. Why won’t any of you see that?” Her voice had become hard and flat with suppressed rage. But not sufficiently suppressed, it seemed.
“I’m going now,” he said, taking a step back, as if he was backing away from a vicious dog. “Thanks for your help.”
She wanted him to wait. To at least stay long enough to get her phone number so he could call if there were problems. If he got sick. Or if he found his sick brother. But he was already walking down the sidewalk. The muscles in Nina’s legs trembled as she tried to take a couple of swaying steps after him. She didn’t even have the strength to call out. She was afraid she would throw up again if she so much as flexed a single muscle in the region of her neck. But when he got to the corner, he turned around spontaneously. He hesitated for so long she thought maybe he had changed his mind after all.
“The children,” he said then. “In Hungary, Roma children are often removed from their homes. For example if someone in the family is seriously ill or … or something. That’s why they’re afraid. That’s why they don’t dare go to the doctor here. Because the children don’t always come home again.”
He looked as if he wanted to say more, but then he turned his back on her again, lengthened his strides, and disappeared down Jagtvej. She stood perfectly still for a while, waiting for her nausea to subside.
IS HEAD HURT like crazy. Sándor cautiously fingered his eyebrow, tracing the edges of the wound under the bandage, but that wasn’t where most of the pain was coming from. When the blow hit, his head had slammed back and something in his neck had dislocated, or at least that was how it felt. And the ribs on his left side ached with a steady, dull pain with every breath he took.
Traffic churned past on both sides of a narrow central strip of trees. It wasn’t very dark yet even though it was past ten, and though he felt like sitting down on the sidewalk and leaning against a wall, there were limits to how weird he could act out here in the open where everyone could see him.
It was no longer hot. There was a sharpness in the air, and a shiver ran through him when he breathed, partly because of the cold, partly because of the shock. Someone had hit him. Someone had kicked him while he was down. Someone had thrown rocks at him. There was a tumultuous, injured humiliation inside him. He felt picked on. The entire Hungarian part of his upbringing was in offended uproar—“You can’t just hit people, you know!”—while at the same time he could hear his stepfather Elvis’s sarcastic scorn when he had been stupid enough to complain that someone had pushed him at school. Crybaby. Push back!
He hadn’t found Tamás.
Even though the place was at the address Tamás had given him, Tamás wasn’t there. No one would admit having seen him. No one would say where he was. And when Sándor had kept asking, insisted … it had happened in a flash. There hadn’t been any introductory pushing or bumping chests, they had just … let him have it. Three or four quick blows and, when he fell down, a kick to the kidneys and one in the side. He wasn’t even sure which of them had hit h
im, after the first man, that little square guy with the mustache, the one who sounded like he came from Szeged. He was the one who had busted Sándor’s eyebrow.
As he lay doubled over on the filthy, gritty concrete floor of the repair shop, he heard the sound of breaking glass. Then they hauled him up onto his feet and pushed him up against the wall, and the Szeged man stuck something right up in his face, so close that Sándor had to squint to see that it was a broken bottle.
They’re going to slit my throat.
He had time to think that thought, disjointed and panicky and yet strangely matter-of-fact. A noise came out of his throat, a squeak that was both pain and fear. And that very instant there was a pling! from his mobile phone, an absurdly everyday sound in the midst of impending death. That didn’t stop the man with the broken bottle.
“Get lost,” he said coldly. “If we see you here again.…”
He didn’t need to say any more. The edge of the broken glass rested sharp and cold against Sándor’s cheek, and Sándor could feel his pulse throbbing in his carotid artery a few centimeters down.
“You and your mulo brother.…” one of the other men whispered. “Mamioro, scram.”
And Sándor had run away. His tail between his legs, his throat full of bile. But when he got outside, there was nowhere to go. After all, he had to find Tamás.
Mulo. He remembered that word because ghosts and evil spirits were staples of his grandmother’s bedtime stories. Mamioro? Wasn’t there a story about.…
But the memory slipped through his fingers like a fish squirming its way out of the fisherman’s grasp. And mulo was ominous enough on its own. Why were they calling his brother an evil spirit?
He shuddered and suddenly noticed that he was in his shirtsleeves, leaning up against a wall whose cool stone façade was sucking the heat out of his body with each second. His jacket. What happened to it?
Damn it. That’s right, the nurse had helped him to take it off.
He swore softly and starting walking back toward the street where she had dropped him off. It wasn’t far; it couldn’t be. A quiet side street off the noisy boulevard he was on now with three- or four-story residential buildings on both sides and some fragile, freshly planted trees in pots here and there.…
Was it here? FEJøGADE the sign said, a collection of letters that refused to make any kind of sense in his head whatsoever. And people said Hungarian was hard.…
The little, red Fiat was parked next to the curb, with a spider web shaped pattern in the rear window where the rock had hit it. He put his hands on the roof and peered in the side windows. Yes. There it was, tossed on the back seat with the first aid kit she had used when she patched him up. He grabbed the door handle, but of course the car was locked. The locking reflex was apparently so ingrained in city dwellers that it would take more than a stomach bug to defeat it.
He tried to figure out which building was hers. Surely she had parked as close as she could, but there weren’t very many free spots to choose from. He stared doubtfully at the big entry door closest to the Fiat. Was that it? He couldn’t be sure. And which floor? He stared at the row of lit buzzer buttons with neatly typed names behind Plexiglas. HANSEN, KRONBORG, H. SKOVGAARD, MALENE HVIDT & RASMUS BJERG POULSEN.… She hadn’t said what her name was. He tentatively pressed the button next to HANSEN, but there was no answer. KRONBORG turned out to be a man’s voice, speaking Danish, of course. Or so Sándor assumed anyway. He couldn’t make out a single word.
It’s just a jacket, he told himself. But he felt still further reduced. Going from a room full of possessions to a duffel bag of just the most essential things. Then the bag was gone—he hadn’t brought it from Valby. And now his Studio Coletti jacket, which with a little generosity could be mistaken for something more classic. What would it be next? For a brief nightmarish moment, he pictured himself roaming the streets of this foreign city stark naked. But he still had his wallet in his trouser pocket, his mobile phone, and the keys to the dorm room that was no longer his.
The phone. He had received a text message, hadn’t he? While he’d been pushed up against the wall with the sharp edge of the broken bottle at his throat.
The message was empty. But it had come from Tamás’s number.
He feverishly pressed “call.” How long had it been since the message had arrived? A half hour? More? Less? He had no idea. He just had to desperately hope his brother was still by the phone.
“Yes?”
“Tamás. Where are you?”
“Who is this?”
Only when the voice began speaking English did he realize it wasn’t Tamás.
“Could I please speak to Tamás?” he tried.
“Who may I say is calling?” said the man on the phone, very correctly, but in some accent that Sándor couldn’t identify. Maybe that was what it sounded like when Danes spoke English.
“I’m his brother.”
“Oh, good. He’s been asking for you. He can’t come to the phone right now, but he really wants to talk to you. Where are you?”
The alarm bells started going off in the back of Sándor’s mind. I don’t trust them. I only trust you.
“In Copenhagen,” he said vaguely. “Where’s Tamás now?”
“He’s here with us. He’s sleeping right now. He’s been very sick, and he’s not doing so well. But I know he’ll be really happy to see you when he wakes up. Where are you? We’ll just come pick you up. It’s no problem.”
I don’t trust you either, Sándor thought. But I don’t have any choice.
“It says FEJøGADE on the sign,” he said and spelled it out for them.
T TOOK A while for her to make it up the stairs. Nina’s legs were sluggish and sore, and she was forced to stop on the landing halfway up to gather her strength for the last flight. Then she let herself into the apartment and stood for a moment, on wobbly legs, contemplating her next move.
Leaving the boy and the other children at the garage was no longer an option. She wanted to get them all over to Bispebjerg Hospital and have them checked out, but her powers of persuasion had been woefully insufficient, and she had a serious bruise on the back of her hand to remind her of that fact. It would take both the social welfare authorities and the police to get the children out of there. What this would mean for their parents was no longer a concern she could afford to be influenced by.
She called Magnus’s mobile, her fingers feeling like oversized gummy bears. He sounded like his usual calm, overworked self when he answered. It was 10:10 P.M., but he was still at the Coal-House Camp waiting for the medical transport he had just ordered for one of the camp’s elderly residents. Of course Valby wouldn’t shock him either.
“You could call one of the pediatricians at Rigshospitalet,” he said. “They have details of all the agencies you’ll need. They are the ones who pick up the pieces when little kids get beaten by mom and dad. They know what they’re doing.”
Nina sighed. Damnit, this wasn’t the same thing at all. Magnus was quiet on the other end of the line.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Nina had no idea how he did it, but Magnus had something like a sixth sense when it came to illness. As if he could hear it, even over the phone, even when the call was routed via satellites.
“I’m not one hundred percent,” she admitted, sitting down on the edge of the sofa.
Someone said something to Magnus in the background. The medical transport team must have finally arrived, and Nina waited, supporting herself with her hand on the coffee table, while Magnus directed them down the hallway. Then he was back on the line.
“Right,” Magnus said. “Here’s what we’ll do. You come out here now. Take a taxi. We’ve got to have a look at you, too.”
Nina smiled weakly at the phone.
“I’ve got to get the boy to a hospital first.”
Magnus snorted. “Now you listen to me. I’ll take care of the Valby kids, but only if you come out here. Now. Besides …” Magnus exhaled
heavily into the phone, and Nina guessed he was on his way over to the clinic. “… the faster we run some tests on you, the faster we’ll figure out what’s going on with those children. It can be difficult to get the social welfare authorities off their backsides, so it could easily take a few hours before anything happens in that department. You’re sick. Let’s start with you. I’m sure you’re suffering from the same thing.”
“You’re just saying that to get me to do what you want,” she said. “So I’ll quit being a nuisance.”
His warm, rural Swedish laugh resonated into her telephone ear.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But I’m right, aren’t I?”
SHE DIDN’T TAKE a cab. She wasn’t completely helpless, even though it was surprisingly hard to turn the key in the ignition.
Her fingers trembled, and to her intense irritation after two fruitless attempts she was forced to rest her hands on her thighs, take a deep breath, and try again. This time the motor started. Fucking hell. Nina swore softly in a mix of relief and frustration. She sat still for a moment, trying to get control of her body before she put the car in gear and backed out onto the road. So far, so good. She cast a quick glance in the rearview mirror just before she turned onto Jagtvej and caught a glimpse of a lanky, girlish figure on a clunky old lady’s bicycle. Then the cyclist disappeared from view. Ida? Nina tried to turn her head and catch sight of the cyclist again, but the movement made her head pound, so she gave up. No, of course it wasn’t. Ida was at Anna’s.
Nina suddenly felt miserably alone. Her thoughts drifted off into the darkness around her. She pictured all of them, Anton, Ida, Morten, and herself, as small, illuminated fireflies surrounded by black nothing, each heading off in its own direction.
HE CAR THAT had come to get Sándor was a dark-blue Volkswagen Touareg. A chocolate labrador was sitting in the back. It breathed on him the whole way, heavy and wet down the back of his neck. Mounted in the back seat next to Sándor was an infant’s car seat, which reassured him. One of the two men seemed perfectly ordinary, unthreatening and reasonably trustworthy. Probably in his mid-forties, blond, casually dressed in deck shoes, khaki chinos, and a thin, navy blue wool sweater with a little Ralph Lauren polo player embroidered on the chest.
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